after reading a bit in the back of the book i noticed that there was a part encouraging people to use there imagination and create there own units and what not. being really intrigued by this i was wondering what the rest of our gaming community thinks about this.

If someone were to create there own unit for fluff, modelling/ painting or just cause you think it would be cool to have in your army, would you play against it ?

for myself i have 10 foot troops that i made to have a blunderbuss, just cause i thought it looked cool. up till now i have been sometimes using them as counts as hand gunners, but then i thought wouldn't it be cool to have a unit armed with the blunderbuss from the empire rule book!

I just find that one persons take on cool and nifty new rules are another persons not cool or nifty rules. I prefer the counts as rules. I'm not even a super fan of the counts as rules often.

I mean for mega battles and stuff, sure. Even if it was a themed scenario like "Crazy engineer tests his new guns" or something like that I might be more inclined. But that's me. I ahev had NOTHING but bad experiences letting people play their own made up rules and stuff. Even let one guy try something he thought was cool in Flames of War, then he started rules lawyering his own rule during the game. He actually broke it down and argued the "rules as written vs. rules intent" with me. He wrote the stupid rule!

I've had equally poor experience in warhammer. I just try to avoid it usually. Proxies for the same reason.

I think proxies are ok as long as it is completely obvious what the model is representing. I use proxies in most of my armies but I think I do a fairly good job of it. Don't put down a unit of saurus and say "these are temple guard" especially when they are exactly the same as the other 3 units of saurus that you have. Your opponent needs to be able to quickly discern what they are without having to ask.

As for creating completely new units or rules, I don't really like it and definitely wouldn't play a league game where they were used. In a larger setting like a megabattle I think it would be ok since the large size sort of negates the advantages that such a unit might have.

I've had equally poor experience in warhammer. I just try to avoid it usually. Proxies for the same reason.

Are you talking about proxying one model for another or something else entirely? If it's model - is there a particular problem with that?

I hate all proxies. For such a visual game I tend to get finicky on people subbing stuff out and such. Especially in games that matter like a league setting. The whole "The regular goblins are actually night goblins" thing was a special treat for me once. Especially when they spit out fanatics. Right, you said something once an hour ago about them being night goblins, and since I couldn't be bothered to remember my unit of dwarfs just got pastified. Good game!

Putting things like sticky notes on the unit ruins the visual for me as well.

I just really like ther WYSIWYG element of mini wargames. Oddly, a cool conversion or "counts as" I really enjoy. So if someone models and paints up a lizardman stegadon in a cool way to represent a Chaos Warshrine I am all for it. But if they just plop down the same stegadon with no work done to it and call it a chaos warshrine I'll not look to play them again.

ScottRadom wrote:I just really like ther WYSIWYG element of mini wargames. Oddly, a cool conversion or "counts as" I really enjoy. So if someone models and paints up a lizardman stegadon in a cool way to represent a Chaos Warshrine I am all for it. But if they just plop down the same stegadon with no work done to it and call it a chaos warshrine I'll not look to play them again.

OK, well I think that's more than fair enough. There's more an enough room to do a complete disservice to even a friendly game by poor proxying, esp. given some of the examples you gave, such as identical units on the table reprenting different things, etc. Who is going to remember that except the person whose army it is... and even then I wouldn't quite trust that things aren't being mistaken by both players.

So I agree with you for sure in this regard. These games need to be WYSIWYG to some degree. As a Chaos Dwarf player the options for various models are few and far between unless we $hell out for originals... but the CD community is pretty solid on making sure everything is consistently WYSIWYG. I guess my big unit of 49 Dawi Slaves with shaved heads and in chains that "counts as vanilla Chaos Dwarf Warriors" isn't too much of a stretch given that there's a big honking Chaos Dwarf in the middle of them and there's no other funny buisiness or surprises with them. Hope this means you'll still be up for a match-up against Chaos Dwarfs some time!

And this is where I get to be a bit of a hypocrite. I draw a line somewhere in my own head between cool modeling and the counts as rule vs. proxying.

If someone converts a unit up to portray something wicked, I am all for it. I think of Chaos Maruaders in a nurgle army being used with a lot of zombie bits and stuff. I like it, even though one could argue it's close to a proxy.

I am all for a chaos dwarf army made entirely out of converting regular dwarfs. I am all for an ogre army using ANYTHING but the shitacular gnoblar mini's for gnoblars.

In some instances it's not very possible to confuse some cool modeling jobs with anything other than what they're supposed to be. IN other instances seeing an ENTIRE army of hobgoblin wolf riders being fielded as a "counts as" dark elves army is gay. Even though there is no confusion as EVERY mini was representing a dark elf rider ('Cept the dragon guy) it just absolutley rubbed me wrong. It went against 25 years of warhammer fluff.

Really, hobgoblins representing dark elves? That just doesn't even make sense! Why not have them represent goblin wolf riders?! It's one thing to have a themed army, its another to try to shoehorn your good theme idea into whichever army book has the best rules.